The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [532]
Jesse’s accomplishments up to that point had been impressive. But in the summer of 1981, she was still working under the direction of Aaron Lightner and she had seldom even spoken to the governing council of the Talamasca or the handful of men and women who were really in charge.
So when David Talbot, the head of the entire order, called her up to his office in London, she was surprised. David was an energetic man of sixty-five, heavy of build, with iron-gray hair and a consistently cheerful manner. He offered Jesse a glass of sherry and talked pleasantly about nothing for fifteen minutes before getting to the point.
Jesse was being offered a very different sort of assignment. He gave her a novel called Interview with the Vampire. He said, “I want you to read this book.”
Jesse was puzzled. “The fact is, I have read it,” she said. “It was a couple of years ago. But what does a novel like this have to do with us?”
Jesse had picked up a paperback copy at the airport and devoured it on a long transcontinental flight. The story, supposedly told by a vampire to a young reporter in present-day San Francisco, had affected Jesse rather like a bad dream. She wasn’t sure she liked it. Matter of fact, she’d thrown it away later, rather than leave it on a bench at the next airport for fear some unsuspecting person might find it.
The main characters of the work—rather glamorous immortals when you got right down to it—had formed an evil little family in antebellum New Orleans where they preyed on the populace for over fifty years. Lestat was the villain of the piece, and the leader. Louis, his anguished subordinate, was the hero, and the one telling the tale. Claudia, their exquisite vampire “daughter,” was a truly tragic figure, her mind maturing year after year while her body remained eternally that of a little girl. Louis’s fruitless quest for redemption had been the theme of the book, obviously, but Claudia’s hatred for the two male vampires who had made her what she was, and her own eventual destruction, had had a much stronger effect upon Jesse.
“The book isn’t fiction,” David explained simply. “Yet the purpose of creating it is unclear. And the act of publishing it, even as a novel, has us rather alarmed.”
“Not fiction?” Jesse asked. “I don’t understand.” “The author’s name is a pseudonym,” David continued, “and the royalty checks go to a nomadic young man who resists all our attempts at contact. He was a reporter, however, much like the boy interviewer in the novel. But that’s neither here nor there at the moment. Your job is to go to New Orleans and document the events in the story which took place there before the Civil War.”
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me there are vampires? That these characters—Louis and Lestat and the little girl Claudia—are real!”
“Yes, exactly,” David answered. “And don’t forget about Armand, the mentor of the Théâtre des Vampires in Paris. You do remember Armand.”
Jesse had no trouble remembering Armand or the theater. Armand, the oldest immortal in the novel, had had the face and form of an adolescent boy. As for the theater, it had been a gruesome establishment where human beings were killed on stage before an unsuspecting Parisian audience as part of the regular fare.
The entire nightmarish quality of the book was coming back to Jesse. Especially the parts that dealt with Claudia. Claudia had died in the Theater of the Vampires. The coven, under Armand’s command, had destroyed her.
“David, am I understanding you correctly? You’re saying these creatures exist?”
“Absolutely,” David answered. “We’ve been observing this type of being since we came into existence. In a very real way, the Talamasca was formed to observe these creatures, but that’s another story. In all probability, there are no fictional characters in this little novel whatsoever, but that would be your assignment, you see—to document the existence of the New Orleans coven, as described here—Claudia, Louis, Lestat.”
Jesse laughed. She couldn’t help it. She really laughed. David